Don Quixote Review

How without feeling as addled as its hero to try to say something new about Don Quixote? About the work once singled out by the Nobel Institute as the greatest novel of all time? After imperishable tributes by Fielding, Sterne, Samuel Johnson, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Twain, Faulkner, Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Lukcs, Borges, Paz, Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera? The lowly academic hack in this case female, a plumpish Sanchita Panza, without donkey or wineskin or really much more than turista Spanish feels especially unqualified. And besides, who really cares?

Not sure what the “female” part has to do with it, but anyhow Terry Castle gives it a try: she reviews the new translation by Edith Grossman in the Atlantic.